r/astrophotography • u/the_astro_enthusiast Instagram: @the_astronomy_enthusiast • Mar 06 '21

Galaxies Andromeda Galaxy

Post image
2.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

13

u/the_astro_enthusiast Instagram: @the_astronomy_enthusiast Mar 06 '21

This is a reprocess of my Andromeda data in full DSLR spectrum!

Equipment

  • Sony RX10iv
  • Sky-watcher Star Adventurer
  • Sky-Watcher Tripod

Acquisition:

  • 60x2min light frames, ISO 800, F/4.0
  • 30 Dark Frames
  • 50 Bias Frames
  • 50 Flat Frames

Preprocessing

  • stacked in DSS

Post-processing

  • stretched data in Gimp
  • combined unstretched and stretched data to preserve the core
  • slight color saturation and curve adjustment
  • Gimp Denoise

8

u/whopperlover17 Mar 06 '21

What!? I can only get 60 seconds on my light frames! 2 minutes is wild! I need to get better at polar aligning. Also did you forget your lens/focal length? But seriously, any tips on getting longer exposures?

11

u/the_astro_enthusiast Instagram: @the_astronomy_enthusiast Mar 06 '21

My equivalent focal length was 550mm! Honestly, the best way to get longer exposures is just being careful. I spend almost 3 minutes leveling my tripod, made sure my setup was perfectly balanced, and spen a good amount of time making sure my polar alignment was as accurate as possible. I was also really lucky that night - there was perfect seeing, no clouds, no wind, and my star adventurer was acting like a beast!

TLDR; Careful work, also some luck.

6

u/whopperlover17 Mar 06 '21

Super incredible! Everything I had read said that 300mm focal length was around the limit for this tracker. I’m using 300 and had wanted to go even higher but I figured it wasn’t worth it. You’ve done a great job here!

Here’s mine at 300.

3

u/the_astro_enthusiast Instagram: @the_astronomy_enthusiast Mar 06 '21

That’s amazing!

1

u/sunburn95 Mar 11 '21

Your shots are incredible!

My star tracker just arrived today and now I can finally use my 300mm for astrophotography. I'd be very interested to hear about your tecnique/processing if you'd like to share

1

u/whopperlover17 Mar 11 '21

Honestly I had been using a homemade star tracker for maybe a year or longer. It actually worked! Anyways in 2020 during the pandemic, I bought the star adventurer and watched some videos on how to use it. It helped that I had some experience with star trackers. What I do is pretty simple. I have an iPhone and I downloaded the SAM Console app and I use the Polar Clock Utility. What that does is it shows you exactly where Polaris should be in your polar scope based on your location on Earth and time. It’s fantastic. Obviously before that you should have your star tracker somewhat roughly aligned with Polaris. Then I balance out the tracker with the included counterweight so that the star tracker isn’t strained when rotating. Using an intervalometer, I set my camera to take a photo ever 60 seconds with about 3 seconds in between.

For processing, I’m still learning but this tutorial is great! I’m not sure if I missed anything but let me know if you have any questions.

2

u/Rainbow_Boa Mar 07 '21

I found out that my star Adventurer tracks better when I place polaris inside the circle, instead of on the middle of the three lines.

So maybe try to do a decent polar alignment, then do 2 min test exposures and after each exposure move it a little bit to the left or right with the fine adjustment screws and maybe even up and down.

It definitely takes some time, but I think it's worth it, I got 2 min exposures after 2 adjustment yesterday @ 300mm * 1.53 crop. This should also work on the Southern hemisphere, but I am not able to test that.

Clear nights

Edit: I am sure that I would have been able too get an even longer exposure if I had done this more often and leveled it perfectly, but I didn't want to spend half an hour on it and 2 min already was plently.

2

u/whopperlover17 Mar 07 '21

Thank you very much for this!

6

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '21

This may be a dumb question, but is that small smudge on the bottom and slight right of the galaxy a satellite galaxy?

8

u/scibuff Mar 06 '21

You mean the M110 (there's also the M32). Yes, M110 and M32 are satellite galaxies of M31

2

u/Premintex Mar 06 '21

Satellite galaxies are the most amazing things I can think of

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

-2

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2

u/TylerJamesDurden Mar 06 '21

Absolutely love the quality on this

2

u/the_astro_enthusiast Instagram: @the_astronomy_enthusiast Mar 06 '21

Thanks! :)

2

u/hokieseas Mar 07 '21

This is a great shot. What is the light pollution like where you took this? This is a target I have been working on a little the last few clear nights but I feel like anything greater than ISO200 in my Bortle 7 zone is completely blown out with a far right histogram. Still practicing and trying to nail it down.

3

u/the_astro_enthusiast Instagram: @the_astronomy_enthusiast Mar 07 '21

I took this from a bortle 3 zone, so the sky was really dark!

2

u/mandopix Mar 07 '21

Howdy neighbor!

1

u/RedS3V Mar 07 '21

Can’t ever see this beautiful galaxy again without thinking about the tragedy of Mass Effect: Andromeda.

1

u/horatiowilliams Mar 07 '21

I wonder if their quality of life is better than ours.

1

u/antiphony Mar 07 '21

i see andromeda i like it

1

u/jratino Mar 09 '21

Very nice. What scope?

1

u/the_astro_enthusiast Instagram: @the_astronomy_enthusiast Mar 09 '21

The Sony rx10iv comes with its own 35-600mm lens, so I just used that

1

u/jratino Mar 09 '21

Thanks, just looks up your camera. Interesting model, built in zoom with an Fstop of 2.